


Purgatory

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-12
Updated: 2008-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry ponders his afterlife.  A bit of a ghost story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purgatory

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks and hugs to diachrony for her beta of this piece - you're a wonderful help, my dear.
> 
> Written for amberspyglass

 

 

If Henry had known what he was unlocking, he would never have pulled the trigger. Especially since the door had been barred behind him.

The first months were blurs of color and tears, seeing Richard laid sunken and pale in a hospital bed as the players in his former life entered and exited as though they, not he, were the ghosts. His mother, dark and sleek and reduced to a paper cutout of herself, whispering misplaced thanks to the boy Henry had shot. Francis, his hands tugging at each other as they searched for the cigarette he was denied in the ICU. Charles, stinking of whiskey and embarrassment.

Camilla, always stopping with her slim hand inches from the door.

He found out fairly quickly that he couldn't get beyond a few yards from Richard's bedside. Henry gradually formed a hypothesis for this connection to Richard; it was as though the lands and grooves on the bullets they'd both taken had marked them, bound them together as branded slaves to the same master. He wondered whether that happened to every victim marked by the same weapon, but had no way of researching the question. Where Richard went, Henry could not but follow, a reluctant and eventually very bitter dog on a leash.

As Richard recovered in his solitary white bed, Henry's vision sharpened, his sense of time re-establishing the inescapable tics of the second hand. He paced at Richard's bedside in his long winter coat, his own blood still tacky on the side of his face.

"I know you can't hear me, Richard, and I should be glad of it," he opined, denied the familiarity of fine paper and his heavy Mont Blanc. "At last I can experience the world from a reasonable remove. No one interferes, no one interrupts. And yet," he deadpanned, rounding on his unwitting roommate, "I can't act. I can't do anything, and I can't ever be alone."

On his bed, in a morphine haze, Richard mumbled and clutched his sheets with his solid, blue-collar fingers.

Henry shook his head. "And it had to be you I'm chained to for eternity," he said wonderingly, still amazed at what the Fates had given him. "Camilla I could have loved, in a way I was only just beginning to accept. Francis I could pity as he drowns under his family obligations or applaud if he ever walks away from them. Charles I could laugh at as he digs himself further into the cycle of rehabilitation and relapse. Even Bunny, whom I hated with a passion I never knew I had in me, would be better than this colorless existence, the shadowed competence of the unremarkable." He felt his face twisting into a sardonic mask, the never-completely-dry blood on his cheek pulling at his skin.

Days passed, and Richard left the hospital to recuperate in Brooklyn, the clutter and furniture and aura of the professor's apartment all taking on a Richard-patina of California plasticity - a bright nylon jacket, an abandoned paper coffee cup still a quarter full of latte and colorful sprinkles. Henry speculated on the symmetry of it as he stepped carefully out of Richard's path, following Richard's lead in a dance only he could see.

Henry only allowed Richard to walk through him once. The gooseflesh risen on Richard's arms in no way made up for the distaste Henry had felt being enveloped by living heat and then discarded like excrement.

The months following the sojourn in New York were one continuous game of follow-the-leader as Richard trooped from classroom to dean's office to admissions, fighting with unexpected tenacity to keep his scholarship and graduate with a hard-won degree in English. Henry would have been more impressed if the actions hadn't felt so desperate, like the flailings of a steerage passenger flung from the deck of the Titanic into the heaving ocean. He felt a snarl take hold of his face.

"You're full of that can-do California spirit," he hissed into Richard's ear, wondering dimly at the Francis-like venom in that sentence.

When Henry found himself a phantom in his own car, on a cross-country journey to California and Richard's graduate program, Sophie Dearbold in the passenger seat, he held himself stiff amongst their books and wardrobes, seething with frustration as he was dragged further and further away from familiar shores, an Odysseus tied to a mast for eternity - unheard and unheeded even as the Sirens' song faded and was lost behind them.

Once, Richard's exhaustion dragged him into doze and set the car wobbling on the dark highway, nearly clipping a semi-trailer before Sophie jerked him awake with a squeal. At her panicked insistence, he turned the car into a rest stop. Henry could almost feel his heartbeat, where it would have sped up at the near-collision. He had a sudden, sweet vision of Richard gaining his own Rorschach stain of blood, rising from his corpse to look dumbly at Henry's waiting figure, and experienced the first cold finger of regret since he'd woken to this half-life. He blinked, looking down at Richard, curled up on Sophie's lap.

"Maybe there's an end to this, Richard. You do have to die sometime." Richard turned in his sleep, a thin line of drool snaking from the corner of his open mouth to glisten in the artificial lights of the rest stop.

The tiny apartment Richard and Sophie settled on stank of the worst sort of West Coast living, practically a motel room complete with palmetto bugs and a filthy kidney-shaped pool. The inevitable spats between Richard and his dancer girlfriend grew closer and closer together until they blended into a sine wave of cursing and make-up sex. Henry resolutely turned his face from both, though the sounds were almost more than he could bear. Once, he tried to speak rumors to Richard, a wraith-like Claudius dripping poison in his brother's ear, but he may as well have been whispering to a stone. The relationship fell apart of its own accord, and the Sophie moved out, leaving the man alone with his ghost.

"It's just you and me, Richard. Adrift on this sea of mediocrity." Henry watched Richard's dry, empty eyes as he slowly drained a bottle of bourbon, eyes that stared blankly at the closed door where he'd last seen Sophie. Henry tilted his head and tried to calculate the probability of Richard drinking himself to death. The thought stirred in his chest, an imaginary dust devil.

It turned out he needed to wait even longer than cirrhosis would have indicated, years and more during which Richard Papen became a stooped and rounded academic amidst the fresh air and lazy attitudes of the west coast. However, once the problem was detected, the downhill tumble was assured. Richard retreated behind his blank face as the doctor described the prognosis for pancreatic cancer. Henry lit up from within, hands in the pockets of his long dark coat, feeling anticipation tighten his spectral muscles, knowing that finally, _finally_ something new was about to happen.

He tried again to plant ideas in Richard's mind. "Go ahead and end it where it began, Richard. Go home to Hampden." He paused, then hissed, "See Camilla one last time." He gasped, almost taking it back. Surely, he couldn't still be pining after Camilla, even if Richard was. Surely. Henry shook his head, afraid to answer himself.

Maybe this time it worked - a few days later, Richard put his professor's flat on the market and bought a one-way ticket to New England, where the leaves would be turning gold. Henry endured the plane ride with gritted teeth, stepping from one empty space to another for the entire four-hour ride. It was raining when they finally pulled into town in a battered cab, aspen and maple leaves obscuring the wet pavement.

Henry wished he could breathe deep of the air, smell the loam and the bite of winter on the way. Richard rolled down his window and did it for him, and grimaced. Hunching his shoulders against the chill, Richard muttered something under his breath. The car turned majestically, stirring leaves and coming to rest in the parking lot of the Albemarle.

Henry felt a dry rasp of a chuckle climb up his throat. Richard had an odd sense of the appropriate.

The huge building loomed over them. Henry stood staring at the facade, hands in his pockets, until the leash tightened and he stumbled into the hotel after Richard.

The desk clerk couldn't let Richard reserve the room Henry had rented for Camilla thirteen years ago. The hotel had remodeled since, and the space was now an alcove filled with vending machines selling bottled water and power bars. Richard let the bellman haul his suitcase upstairs and tipped him with an unexamined bill. Henry knew what was in it - a few changes of clothes, all used as packing material for Richard's old Greek textbooks. Interestingly, he'd left the Proust and Jacobean tragedies with his college's library. 

Henry felt a grim appreciation of the symmetry.

Camilla was to arrive the next day. Richard stumbled back and forth between the luggage and the desk, slowly transferring the heavy books into a facsimile of scholarly disarray. Henry stood in the corner to watch, arms folded.

"It won't make her love you, Richard," he grated, "you're no Cyrano." Richard laid down the last well-thumbed text and nearly fell back onto the hotel bed, face pale and breath rattling.

It happened that night - an irony that curled Henry's lips. He saw it happen, the long habit of ennui finally set aside as he watched Richard's ghost climb from his corpse, a butterfly still wet and trembling.

Henry found his insubstantial heart throbbing, so greatly did he welcome the eruption of something new, someone like him, a man he could speak with.

"Richard." His voice was gentle, and as calm as he could force it.

The new ghost turned to look blindly about the room, snagging on the cooling body lumped into the center of the bed. He gave no indication he'd heard anything.

"Richard." More sternly this time, to cover a note of uncertainty.

Richard shook his head and turned blind eyes once more around the room. Seeming to take a deep breath, his shoulders slumped and he unraveled, outline to centerpoint gone in an eyeblink.

Henry kept his feet for only a moment, then slipped to his knees. He bent around the hole in his chest and laughed again, the unheard peals rising to a madman's cackle. 

 


End file.
